The world needs a massive carbon tax in just 10 years to limit climate change, IMF says

The international organization suggests a cost of $75 per ton by 2030.

By Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman, The Washington Post, Oct. 10, 2019

A global agreement to make fossil fuel burning more expensive is urgent and the most efficient way of fighting climate change, an International Monetary Fund study found on Thursday.

The group found that a global tax of $75 per ton by the year 2030 could limit the planet’s warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or roughly double what it is now. That would greatly increase the price of fossil-fuel-based energy — especially from the burning of coal — but the economic disruption could be offset by routing the money raised straight back to citizens.

“If you compare the average level of the carbon tax today, which is $2 [a ton], to where we need to be, it’s a quantum leap,” said Paolo Mauro, deputy director of the fiscal affairs department at the IMF.

The IMF report comes out as financial institutions increasingly grapple with the risks associated with climate change, including damage from sea-level rise, extreme weather events and billions in fossil fuel reserves that might be in excess of what can be burned while also limiting warming. The Federal Reserve, for example, is taking a closer look at how climate change may pose a risk to economic stability.

In the United States, a $75 tax would cut emissions by nearly 30 percent but would cause on average a 53 percent increase in electricity costs and a 20 percent rise for gasoline at projected 2030 prices, the analysis in the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor found.

But it would also generate revenue equivalent to 1 percent of gross domestic product, an enormous amount of money that could be redistributed and, if spread equally, would end up being a fiscally progressive policy, rather than one disproportionately targeting the poor.

The impact of a $75-per-ton tax would also hit countries differently depending on burning or exporting coal, which produces the most carbon emissions per unit of energy generated when it is burned.

In developing nations such as China, India and South Africa, a $75 carbon tax reduces emissions even more — by as much as 45 percent — and generates proportionately more revenue, as high as 3.5 percent of GDP in South Africa’s case, the IMF found.

The idea of making it expensive to produce greenhouse gas emissions is hardly new, and has been widely embraced by economists despite the immense political difficulties involved in imposing such taxes.

“No environmental economist should disagree with the main argument of the paper: Carbon pricing is the single most powerful tool we have for reducing CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, and our current set of policies leaves us nowhere close to meeting our climate goals,” said Marc Hafstead, a climate policy expert with Resources for the Future.

But several experts said that the IMF stance was important even as they noted that the carbon price may need to be a lot higher, rendering an already gigantic lift even more difficult.

Kenneth Gillingham, an economics professor at Yale University who worked on environmental issues during a stint as part of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the IMF’s position added to the urgency recent scientific and economic assessments had shown in discussing how to tackle the climate problem.

“From my perspective this is an exciting change in that they’re thinking more deeply than they had previously,” he said.

But Gillingham said a $75 per ton carbon tax may actually be too low to hold climate change to 2 degrees, noting that he had expected the figure to be closer to $100 per ton, given the world’s high emissions path.

Gernot Wagner, who studies climate policy at New York University, agreed. He co-wrote a paper published Monday arguing that a carbon price should start high and gradually be reduced to take into account the costs of future damage from global warming.

“If one takes climate risk and uncertainty seriously, the numbers rise much higher still,” Wagner said in an email.

Most economists and policymakers have designed carbon tax policies that start relatively low and ramp up quickly over time. Proponents say it would minimize economic hardship for consumers and companies for their past choices while changing future decisions such as purchases of polluting equipment or automobiles.

The Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist William D. Nordhaus has argued that a carbon tax of $300 per ton or even higher might be required.

“Their estimate is, in my view, if anything on the low side of what is needed” but on the high side compared with policies already being implemented in some countries, Nordhaus said in an email.

Moreover, the latest science suggests the world will sustain massive damage, such as the loss of nearly all coral reefs, even if it holds warming to, or just under, 2 degrees Celsius. To keep warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, the carbon tax would have to be even higher, the IMF’s Mauro noted, though he said he is not sure how high because the group did not do that analysis.

“The climate crisis is so dire, and public/popular determination to attack it is suddenly so strong and unquenchable, that even $75/ton by 2030 seems far too moderate a target,” wrote Charles Komanoff, director of the Carbon Tax Center, in an emailed response to the IMF study.

The IMF report considers not just economic policy options, but the political feasibility of these proposals as well, including how they might affect different segments of society and how to make them more politically palatable, such as by redirecting the revenue back to the populace through tax cuts or direct dividend payments.

It shows that in the Group of 20 largest economies, the tax would raise energy costs by an average of 43 percent for electricity and 14 percent for gasoline in the countries considered.

This reflects the growing recognition that policies that impose financial burdens that fall hardest on a particular segment of society could trigger unintended blowback. France’s tax hike on gasoline and diesel, for example, helped spur the violent “yellow vest” protests this year.

Noah Kaufman, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said the IMF joins “the chorus of organizations, experts and even grass-roots groups of people” calling for more aggressive climate action.

“The question is how to spur action, and a group like the IMF has a role to play in making that happen,” he said.

How to Cut Emissions Without Wrecking the Economy

Op-ed by Christopher Crane and Ted Halstead

The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 23, 2019

In a major shift, the Business Roundtable recently embraced the idea that the purpose of a corporation should go beyond serving shareholders and include responsibility to the environment and the broader community. On no issue is this more true than climate policy—which affects all sectors of society, but where market prices do not internalize environmental costs. So what exactly would a pro-business, pro-environment and pro-consumer climate solution look like?

To answer this question, the broadest climate coalition in U.S. history has met in private over the past two years. Brought together by the Climate Leadership Council, of which Exelon is a founding member, this coalition includes corporate sector leaders from a range of industries, environmental nonprofits, economists and opinion leaders from across the political spectrum. The outcome of this two-year dialogue is a breakthrough plan to cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2035—while benefiting American businesses, workers and consumers.

Our plan is based on the concept of carbon dividends: a gradually rising fee on all carbon emissions, whose proceeds are returned directly to the American people through quarterly dividend checks. It also calls for significantly simplifying carbon regulations and a border carbon adjustment to protect and promote the competitiveness of American firms. This general framework was first introduced in these pages in 2017 by former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III.

It’s one thing to build an odd-bedfellow coalition around broad principles, quite another to refine the details of an actionable plan. That we have now done. The Council’s Bipartisan Roadmap will be released in the coming months, but we can preview here three of its salient features.

The first is our plan’s environmental ambition. It calls for a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton and increasing annually at 5% above inflation. According to modeling by the research group Resources for the Future, if implemented in 2021 the plan would achieve 50% U.S. CO2 reduction by 2035, as compared with 2005 levels. It would also exceed the 2025 U.S. commitment under the Paris agreement by a wide margin.

Our plan, unlike many of the aspirational proposals floating around these days, is grounded in concrete modeling. It’s also backed up by an Emissions Assurance Mechanism, which specifies that the carbon fee will temporarily increase faster if agreed-upon emissions reduction targets are not achieved.

Second, the vast majority of Americans will be economic winners under our plan. According to the U.S. Treasury, 70% of American families—including the most vulnerable—would come out ahead, receiving more in carbon dividends than they pay in increased energy costs. A family of four would receive approximately $2,000 a year in carbon dividends, an amount that will grow over time as the carbon fee increases. And the more you shrink your carbon footprint, the more you come out ahead. This aligns—for the first time—the economic interests of American families with climate progress.

Third, our plan’s environmental and social ambition is matched by equally strong pro-business and pro-competitiveness provisions.

For starters, our bipartisan plan is revenue-neutral and won’t increase the size of the federal government. Unlike many climate plans, which require large increases in taxes, deficits or both, ours will “finance” the transition to a low-carbon future by incentivizing individual and corporate behavior and by leveraging the extensive resources of the private sector. It will also spur American innovation and let the market decide on the best low-carbon technologies and energy sources.

Enacting the most ambitious carbon price of any leading emitting nation will render many current and future carbon regulations unnecessary. In the majority of cases where a carbon fee offers a more cost-effective solution, the fee will replace regulations. For example, all current and future federal stationary-sources carbon regulations will be displaced or pre-empted. This offers businesses the predictability and flexibility they need to innovate and make long-term investments in a low-carbon future.

No doubt this regulatory streamlining will be controversial in some circles. But the decisive metric in weighing climate policy alternatives should be their ability to reduce emissions. On this score, a meaningful and rising price on carbon easily outperforms regulation-heavy alternatives. For example: If all Obama -era climate regulations had remained in place, they would have reduced U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions only by approximately 18% by 2025, falling well short of Paris commitments. Our plan, by contrast, would achieve 32% reductions by 2025.

Finally, border adjustments for the carbon content of imports and exports will enhance the competitiveness of American firms that are more energy-efficient than their foreign competitors, reversing today’s trade incentives, which effectively subsidize dirtier manufacturing overseas. This will put America in the driver’s seat of global climate policy and encourage other top emitters—such as China and India—to adopt carbon pricing of their own.

Our carbon-dividends plan demonstrates that economic dynamism, environmental stewardship and social well-being are mutually compatible and need not be traded off against one another. It should serve as the basis for a much-needed bipartisan climate breakthrough.

Mr. Crane is president and CEO of Exelon, a provider of emissions-free energy. Mr. Halstead is chairman and CEO of the Climate Leadership Council.

Al Gore: The Climate Crisis Is the Battle of Our Time, and We Can Win

Op-Ed by Al Gore, The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2019

Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could.

The destructive impacts of the climate crisis are now following the trajectory of that economics maxim as horrors long predicted by scientists are becoming realities.

More destructive Category 5 hurricanes are developing, monster fires ignite and burn on every continent but Antarctica, ice is melting in large amounts there and in Greenland, and accelerating sea-level rise now threatens low-lying cities and island nations.

Tropical diseases are spreading to higher latitudes. Cities face drinking-water shortages. The ocean is becoming warmer and more acidic, destroying coral reefs and endangering fish populations that provide vital protein consumed by about a billion people.

Worsening droughts and biblical deluges are reducing food production and displacing millions of people. Record-high temperatures threaten to render areas of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, North Africa and South Asia uninhabitable. Growing migrations of climate refugees are destabilizing nations. A sixth great extinction could extinguish half the species on earth.

Finally people are recognizing that the climate is changing, and the consequences are worsening much faster than most thought was possible. A record 72 percent of Americans polled say that the weather is growing more extreme. And yet every day we still emit more than 140 million tons of global warming pollution worldwide into the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I often echo the point made by the climate scientist James Hansen: The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases — some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years — is now trapping as much extra energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs would release every 24 hours.

This is the crisis we face.

Now we need to ask ourselves: Are we really helpless and unwilling to respond to the gravest threat faced by civilization? Is it time, as some have begun to counsel, to despair, surrender and focus on “adapting” to the progressive loss of the conditions that have supported the flourishing of humanity? Are we really moral cowards, easily manipulated into lethargic complacency by the huge continuing effort to deceive us into ignoring what we see with our own eyes?

More damage and losses are inevitable, no matter what we do, because carbon dioxide remains for so long in the atmosphere. So we will have to do our best to adapt to unwelcome changes. But we still retain the ability to avoid truly catastrophic, civilization-ending consequences if we act quickly.

This is our generation’s life-or-death challenge. It is Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and Sept. 11. At moments of such crisis, the United States and the world have to be mobilized, and before we can be mobilized, we have to be inspired to believe the battle can be won. Is it really too much to ask now that politicians summon the courage to do what most all of them already know is necessary?

We have the technology we need. That economic maxim about slow-fast phenomena, first articulated by the M.I.T. economist Rudiger Dornbusch and known as Dornbusch’s Law, also explains the tsunami of technological and economic change that has given us tools to sharply reduce global warming pollution much faster than we thought was possible only a short time ago. For example, according to the research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as recently as 2014 — a year before the Paris climate agreement was reached — electricity from solar and wind was cheaper than new coal and gas plants in probably 1 percent of the world. Today, only five years later, solar and wind provide the cheapest sources of new electricity in two-thirds of the world. Within five more years, these sources are expected to provide the cheapest new electricity in the entire world. And in 10 years, solar and wind electricity will be cheaper nearly everywhere than the electricity that existing fossil fuel plants will be able to provide.

This transition is already unfolding in the largest economies. Consider the progress made by the world’s top four emitters of greenhouse gases. Last year, solar and wind represented 88 percent of the new electricity capacity installed in the 28 nations of the European Union, 65 percent in India, 53 percent in China and 49 percent in the United States.

This year, several American utilities have announced plans to close existing natural gas and coal generating plants — some with decades of useful life remaining — to replace their output with cheaper electricity from wind and solar farms connected to ever-cheaper battery storage. As the chief executive of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company said recently, “The surprise was how dramatically the renewables and storage proposals beat natural gas.” He added, “I couldn’t have predicted this five years ago.”

Today, the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is solar installer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it has exceeded average job growth sixfold in the last five years. The second-fastest growing job: wind turbine service technician.

In Australia, a high-tech entrepreneur, Mike Cannon-Brookes, is reportedly planning to sell renewable electricity generated in the Northern Territories to South Asian cities over a long-distance undersea cable. Globally, close to 200 of the world’s largest companies have announced commitments to use 100 percent renewable energy, and several have already reached that goal. A growing number of cities, states and provinces have pledged to do the same.

The number of electric vehicles on the road has increased by 450 percent in the past four years, and several automobile manufacturers are shifting research and development spending away from internal combustion vehicles, because the cost-reduction curve for E.V.s is expected to soon drop the cost of the vehicle well below comparable gasoline and diesel models’. Over half of all buses in the world will be electric within the next five years, a majority in China, according to some market experts. At least 16 nations have set targets to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles.

More broadly, the evidence now indicates that we are in the early stages of a sustainability revolution that will achieve the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the digital revolution, made possible by new digital tools. To pick one example, Google has reduced the amount of electricity required to cool its enormous server farms by 40 percent using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. No new hardware was required. Sustainable alternatives to existing methods of industrial production are being pursued by more and more companies.

A farmer-led regenerative agriculture revolution that is also underway avoids plowing and focuses on building soil health by sequestering carbon dioxide in the ground, making the land more fertile. The farmers are using rotational grazing and planting trees and diverse cover crops to enrich soil and protect against erosion.

And so far, the best available technology for pulling carbon dioxide from the air is something called a tree. That’s why many nations are starting ambitious tree planting efforts. Ethiopia recently reported planting 353 million trees in 12 hours, nearly double the goal of 200 million. Scientists calculate that we have enough available land worldwide to plant between one trillion and one and a half trillion trees. To protect our vast but dwindling forests, new satellites and digital tools can now monitor deforestation virtually tree by tree, so corporations will know if the products they buy were grown on razed or burned forestland.

Yet for all this promise, here is another hard truth: All of these efforts together will not be enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently without significant policy changes. And right now, we don’t have the right policies because the wrong policymakers are in charge. We need to end the mammoth taxpayer-funded subsidies that encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels. We need to place a direct or indirect price on carbon pollution to encourage the use of cheaper, sustainable alternatives that are already out there. New laws and regulations may be needed as well to encourage innovation and force more rapid reductions in emissions.

The political reconfiguration we have desperately needed has been excruciatingly slow in coming, but we now seem to be at an inflection point, when political change begins to unroll more rapidly than we thought was possible. It’s Dornbusch’s Law, brought to politics.

The people, in their true function as the sovereign power, are quickly understanding the truth of this crisis, and they are the ones who must act, especially because the president is not on speaking terms with the truth and seems well beyond the reach of reason.

This will require a ferocious attack on the complacency, complicity, duplicity and mendacity of those in Congress who have paid for their careers by surrendering their votes and judgment to powerful special interests that are sacrificing the planet for their greed. To address the climate crisis, we must address the democracy crisis so that the people themselves can reclaim control of their destiny.

As has often been the case in successful political revolutions, young people have taken up the gauntlet with inspiring passion. Greta Thunberg has stirred millions as the school strike movement she began in Sweden spreads to many countries. The Sunrise Movement, the Extinction Rebellion, Zero Hour and other youth-led movements are gathering momentum daily. On Friday, hundreds of thousands of people around the world were marching and gathering to call for action on climate change. Employees of many corporations are aggressively demanding that their employers take action to help save the climate balance.

The “blue wave” that gave Democrats control of the House in last year’s midterm elections was fueled in part by concern about climate. The Green New Deal, introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, ties solutions to the climate crisis to environmental justice and a “just transition” that will create millions of well-paying jobs. This effort has won support from many Americans, just as the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s attracted wide approval and helped pave the way for an arms control agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union.

Virtually all of this year’s Democratic presidential candidates are making the climate a top priority. Many have released impressive and detailed plans that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. A CNN poll in April found that the climate crisis was the No. 1 concern of Democrats who are registered to vote. Another recent poll showed that a record 79 percent of American adults and 86 percent of teenagers believe, finally, that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, and, even more significantly, so do 60 percent of Republicans. Americans’ disapproval of President Trump’s approach to the climate was higher, at 67 percent, than on any other issue.

College Republicans at dozens of schools have called on the Republican National Committee to support a carbon tax and have loudly warned the party that it will forfeit support from younger voters if it does not. Another recent poll shows that 67 percent of millennial Republican voters say their party needs to do more on climate.

Next year’s election is the crucial test of the nation’s commitment to addressing this crisis, and it is worth remembering that on the day after the 2020 election, the terms of the Paris climate accord will permit the United States to withdraw from it. We cannot allow that to happen. Political will is a renewable resource and must be summoned in this fight. The American people are sovereign, and I am hopeful that they are preparing to issue a command on the climate to those who purport to represent them: “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his work to slow global warming. He is the author of, among other books, “An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming.”

Dear 2020 Democrats, If you want to slow climate change, carbon pricing is a necessity.

Op-ed by Noah Kaufman, USA Today, Sept. 5, 2019

Democratic voters are growing more focused on addressing climate change, but the leading presidential candidates are largely steering clear of a critical tool for cutting emissions: carbon pricing. 

The Democrats leading in the polls are aware of the benefits of putting a price on each ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Bernie Sanders has supported carbon pricing policies in the past, and in the CNN climate town hall on Wednesday, both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren responded affirmatively when asked about carbon pricing before quickly pivoting to discuss other policies. But none of these candidates mentions carbon pricing in their detailed climate plans. 

It is the Voldemort of Joe Biden’s climate plan, which torturously describes “an enforcement mechanism … based on the principle that polluters must bear the full cost of the carbon pollution” while avoiding the words “carbon pricing.” It is avoided entirely in Warren’s plans.

Carbon pricing is a third rail that candidates should avoid, or so the conventional wisdom holds. In part, it is a branding problem, because the costs of the carbon price are transparent and explicit. Politicians do not like highlighting costs, especially costs labeled as taxes, and fear that by the time they explain that revenues from the carbon price can be used to offset higher household energy expenditures, constituents will have already tuned out. 

Adding fuel to the concerns of politicians are the failures of high-profile attempts to price carbon: the Waxman-Markey proposal that died in the US Senate in 2010, the yellow vest protests in France last year, and recent state-level policies in Washington State and Oregon.   

The political winds are shifting, however, and Democratic voters now overwhelmingly see climate change as a central issue. Earlier this year, a CNN poll found that over 80 percent of Democratic voters say it is "very important" that candidates support aggressive climate policies, a 20 to 30 point jump from 2016. 

As evidenced by the CNN climate town hall on Wednesday, candidates have received the message. For the first time, all major Democratic presidential candidates are proposing climate plans that stress the need for the complete and rapid decarbonization of the U.S. economy. They are not hiding the massive effort this will entail — each plan contemplates trillions of dollars in spending. Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion plan eclipsed former candidate Jay Inslee’s $9 trillion plan, which one-upped Beto O’Rourke’s $5 trillion plan. Instead of political liabilities, these high price tags are being touted as badges of honor.

In this new context, viewing carbon prices as politically toxic makes far less sense. With aggressive and costly climate plans already on the table, adding a well-designed carbon price will save Americans money rather than cost them money. That’s because it encourages the most inexpensive options to reduce emissions, as opposed to prescribing where and how emissions reductions must occur.

The focus on failed attempts to price carbon also ignores considerable recent policy successes. In fact, in the few jurisdictions around the world that have climate policy success stories, carbon pricing has played a prominent role. The United Kingdom imposed a significant carbon price on its electricity emissions in 2013, and emissions from power plants have fallen nearly 60 percent since. Here in the United States, California’s economy-wide package of climate policies, with a carbon price at the center, have helped cause emissions to steadily fall in the country’s most populous state. And in Germany, coal use is on pace to fall about 20 percent this year due largely to carbon prices rising from under 10 to nearly 30 euros per ton since early 2018.  

Studies led by Columbia University show that a federal carbon price in the United States would be similarly successful. Any of the seven new proposals to price carbon in the U.S. Congress this year would reduce U.S. emissions well beyond the Obama administration’s 2025 target.

With voters demanding climate solutions, presidential candidates can point to not only emissions targets but also a policy with a proven track record of rapidly reducing emissions. They can promise not only trillions in spending but also an effective and efficient source of revenue for that spending. Instead, most of the leading candidates remain squeamish about carbon pricing. 

It may be telling that nearly all of the younger candidates, like Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker, have strongly supported a carbon price as part of a broader climate strategy. 

“I know you're not supposed to use the 'T' word when you're in politics, but we might as well call it what it is,” said Buttigieg on Wednesday when he called for a carbon tax. Does Mayor Pete’s approach reflect inexperience or a fresh-eyed assessment of current political realities? 

The danger is we may never find out. If the leading candidates continue to shun carbon pricing due to a blind acceptance of conventional wisdom, they will fail to build support for a policy that may be our best shot for significant emissions reductions.

Noah Kaufman is an economist and research scholar at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. 

A new tone from some Republicans on climate change — mostly behind closed doors

POLITICO’s latest Global Translations podcast episode explores whether modest climate legislation could pass as soon as this year.

By Anthony Adragna & Luiza Ch. Savage, POLITICO, Aug. 22, 2019

Republicans are beginning to feel the heat on climate change.

Though a significant bloc of the party continues to deny the basic science of the issue, some senior Republicans are showing a willingness to consider incremental legislation to turbo-charge clean energy research funding, invest in greening buildings, support electric vehicle charging infrastructure and promote energy efficiency.

And a few others are going farther, notably Rep. Francis Rooney, who supports a carbon tax — an idea that hasn’t attracted Republican support since a failed cap-and-trade bill nearly a decade ago.

“I don't understand what it is about people in politics that they seem to be immune from some of these large shifts in opinion out there in the real world. I mean almost all the large-company CEOs are for taking reasonable steps to deal with climate change and sea level rise,” said Rooney, who represents a coastal Florida district and served as an ambassador in the George W. Bush administration.

He credited pressure from corporate leaders as helpful for ultimately setting a price on carbon despite ongoing resistance from many in his party.

And behind closed doors, Republicans are even more candid in acknowledging that action is needed, according to their Democratic colleagues.

“I've had very constructive dinners, meetings, conversations with Republican senators who see the threat of climate change, who agree that we need to take action,” said Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware.

“Since I first got here in 2010, virtually all the Republicans with whom I serve in the Senate have moved from denying that there is any change in our climate occurring, to questioning whether it’s caused by humanity, and then continuing to question whether we have any responsibility to do something about it, and whether we can do something about it without harming our own economy,” said Coons, a moderate who’s seen as one of the Senate’s top dealmakers.

Of course, President Donald Trump continues to fight aggressively to undo Obama-era regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. But other important GOP figures have softened their rhetoric on climate change and begun to embrace modest legislative efforts to combat the problem.

The tonal shift among some Republicans comes as a federal government report last fall warned of hundreds of billions of dollars in annual costs related to climate change by mid-century across every region of the country. And the United Nations last year warned the world must achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century to stave off the worst impacts from climate change.

Amid the overwhelming scientific consensus and growing public demands for actions, some senior Republicans, like Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have acknowledged that human activity is driving climate change. Other senior lawmakers have voiced support for more federal funding for clean energy research and other technologies like carbon capture and sequestration. Famed GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who famously pushed Republicans to cast doubt on the science of climate change in the 2000s, pointedly said last month: “I was wrong.”

“In Florida we've got a fairly pro-environmental group — Republican and Democrat,” Rooney said. “It's an existential threat both to the quality of life and to our tourist economy.”

Coons said changing attitudes by corporate leaders concerned about the sustainability of their businesses is driving more climate discussion in Republican politics.

“There’s been a dramatic change in tone from the fossil fuel industry and then more broadly — whether it’s insurance, financial services or consumer-facing companies that are seeing the price they are facing. They are either conveying publicly or privately that their future models for their businesses include a carbon price, or that they have grave concerns about the potential housing market impacts or insurance impacts of steadily increasing storms, wildfires, and tornadoes,” he added.

Those corporate concerns are making themselves heard on Capitol Hill, said Coons.

“We recently had a day where more than 70 CEOs came and lobbied — on a bipartisan basis — members of Congress, and I convened an off-the-record conversation with seven of them and invited a wide range of members. I got a number of Republican House members and senators, and we had a terrific and constructive conversation,” said Coons.

In the House, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) told the podcast, “It is a decidedly different tone than we’ve heard in recent years.”

Blumenauer pointed to effects of climate change on vulnerable states — including melting snowpack in Alaska and disappearing glaciers. “These are things that are seeping into the public consciousness, and I think that [in light of] the sort of the full-throated denial that we heard on the part of so many of my Republican colleagues — that tone is significant, and I think it is reflecting at least in some cases the fact that their citizens that they represent are not going to abide by an approach like that.”

Blumenauer, like many other progressives, has advocated for a Green New Deal to address climate change by rapidly weaning the country off of fossil fuels, which critics have bashed as unworkably expensive and unable to gain bipartisan traction. Supporters of greater federal investment in technological innovation, in contrast, argue it could garner broad support and make a meaningful contribution to reducing U.S. emissions.

Dan Byers, vice president for policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, predicted legislative action in coming months. “I will even go out on a limb and maybe predict that you could see a nice package of climate energy innovation-focused legislation be signed by the president later this year,” he told the podcast.

Byers added, “We only spend about $2 billion a year on clean technology, and so we think that that can be dramatically increased so that we can accelerate a lot of these technologies that we see as essentially being the energy economy of tomorrow.”

While Trump has given notice that the U.S. will withdraw from Paris climate agreement — a move slated to take place the day after the 2020 election — Byers said business leaders prefer that the U.S stay in.

“We think it's absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris climate agreement and at the table in cooperating with other countries. We do think that the Obama administration's pledge was unrealistic, was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we'd like to see that revisited to something that can be buttressed by essentially pushing technology growth,” he said.

Back in the Senate, Coons observed that some of the most robust discussions around climate have to date remained behind closed doors.

“We see relatively few Republican members of the Senate and House who are willing to step forward and say, ‘We’ve got to do this, let’s get to it,’” said Coons. “Privately, there are many more who see this as a challenge than publicly are so far saying this.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/22/climate-change-global-translations-1675710

Frank Luntz, the GOP’s message master, calls for climate action

By Kate Yoder, Grist, July 25, 2019

Frank Luntz’s up-close encounter with our increasingly wild weather came at 3:15 a.m. one morning, when the GOP master messenger woke up to his phone blaring an emergency evacuation warning. Luntz saw flames outside his bedroom window. The famous pollster’s home in Los Angeles was in the path of the Skirball Fire, one of the many wildfires that destroyed parts of Southern California in December 2017.

Luntz, whose advice helped Republicans hold power for years and also keep their heads in the sand when it comes to climate change, cited the fire as an example of the climate crisis made personal. He’s the same political consultant who convinced conservatives to rebrand the “estate tax” as the “death tax.” He crafted talking points for the Koch brothers and reportedly convinced the Trump administration to talk about “border security” to drum up support for building a border wall.

But the reality of climate change is increasingly too hard to ignore. “The courageous firefighters of L.A., they saved my home, but others aren’t so lucky,” he said as he recounted the tale during a Senate testimony on Thursday. “Rising sea levels, melting ice caps, tornadoes, and hurricanes more ferocious than ever. It is happening.”

Luntz was one of three Republicans invited by Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, to speak to the Special Committee on the Climate Crisis about breaking down partisan barriers and taking action on climate change. “Elected Republicans are mostly awful on climate, but it wasn’t always that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way in the future,” Schatz said in a press release before the hearing, “The Right Thing To Do: Conservatives for Climate Action.”

The hearing came amid signs that Republican voters are increasingly out of step with their elected representatives on climate change. In parts of the country hit hardest by extreme weather, like Florida, Republicans are already changing their tune on environmental policy. According to a survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication last year, 52 percent of Republicans said if there’s a conflict between environmental protection and economic growth, the environment should come first.

Luntz played a role in turning the environment into a partisan battlefield. During President George W. Bush’s first term, his infamous memo warned Republican party leaders that they were losing “the environmental communications battle,” an issue on which Bush was “most vulnerable.” He advised them to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around climate change and drop “global warming” for the less scary-sounding “climate change.”

Luntz is now offering his messaging services to the cause of climate action. “I’m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz told the Senate committee. “Just stop using something that I wrote 18 years ago, because it’s not accurate today.”

“That was a lifetime ago,” he said. “I’ve changed.” He promised to help the Democrats on the climate committee, provided that they put “policies ahead of politics” and commit to nonpartisan solutions.

It’s not the first time Luntz has taken up the cause of the environment. Back in 2010, he teamed up with the Environmental Defense Fund and laid out advice to persuade Americans take up the cause of clean energy. But that’s not to say he’s a fan of environmentalists, who he’s called “some of the most personally nasty people” and “mean.”

Luntz came to the hearing prepared to share advice for people pushing for action on the climate crisis. He offered a chart of “words to use and words to lose” based on what he’s learned from focus groups:

• USE: Cleaner, safer, healthier. LOSE: Sustainable/sustainability.

• USE: Solving climate change. LOSE: Ending global warming.

• USE: Principles and priorities. LOSE: Values.

• USE: Reliable technology/energy. LOSE: Ground-breaking/State of the art.

• USE: New careers. LOSE: New jobs.

• USE: Peace of mind. LOSE: Security.

• USE: Consequences. LOSE: Threats/Problems.

• USE: Working together. LOSE: One world.

Activists often point out that combating the climate crisis will create jobs, but Luntz said they should talk in terms of “careers” instead. “A job is something that you can’t wait to get out of. A career is something that you embrace.”

Another suggestion: Drop “sustainability,” because it rings of the “status quo,” he explained. “What American people really want is something that is cleaner, safer, healthier. What they’re asking for is improvement, not the status quo.”

It’s also important to frame climate action as a “no-regrets strategy,” Luntz said. Legislation would lead to cleaner air, cleaner water, less dependence on foreign fuels, enhanced national security, and more innovation in our economy. “And that’s if the scientists are wrong,” he said. “If the scientists are right, we get all of those things and begin to solve what could be the most catastrophic environmental problem that any of us have ever faced … That’s why it’s the right thing to do.”

Stay away from the complicated science of climate change and personalize the message instead, Luntz advised. “How many of you know of someone who either lost a house because of a hurricane, a tornado, a forest fire?” he turned to ask the audience at the hearing. Many raised their hands.

“If I can give you a solution that will prevent most of that from happening, would you invest in it? … What would you be willing to pay to get that home back, to get that opportunity back, to get that life back? The answer for most people is everything.”

https://grist.org/article/the-gops-most-famous-messaging-strategist-calls-for-climate-action/